A British man says he backed out of a shoe-bomb airplane plot in 2001 after his parents told him they wouldn't want their son to be a terrorist.
Saajid Badat testified today in New York City at the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden's son-in-law. Abu Ghaith could face life in prison if he's convicted of conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to al-Qaeda in his role as al-Qaeda's spokesman after the September 11 attacks. He has pleaded not guilty.
Badat says he quit the shoe-bomb plot hatched after 9/11 when he returned home to the United Kingdom and his parents expressed concern that he had been in Afghanistan.
He says his mother told him she wouldn't want her son to be one of those "sleepers."
Prosecutors began questioning Badat yesterday to try to show that then-al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith knew what he was talking about when he threatened Americans in the weeks after September 11 with a second wave of airplane attacks.
Badat, a 34-year-old United Kingdom resident, is expected to testify all day Tuesday by video hookup from London. He refuses to testify in the United States because he faces terrorism charges in Boston that could send him to prison for life.
Yesterday, Badat said he trained with failed shoe-bomber Richard Reid to carry out separate shoe-bomb attacks aimed at downing planes over America or Europe in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks were carried out with four hijacked airplanes.
He pleaded guilty in England in 2005 to conspiring to harm an aircraft and served six years in prison before his sentence was shortened through his cooperation. His plea came in connection with a 2001 plot to down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes.
Prosecutors are using Badat's testimony to show that Abu Ghaith was in the thick of a conspiracy to create a second wave of airborne terrorism attacks while the debris left by the toppled twin towers of the World Trade Center was still burning.
Abu Ghaith is charged with conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to al-Qaeda. If convicted, the 48-year-old onetime imam at a Kuwaiti mosque could face life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.
